In the previous article, we saw that we accept the idea that politics is mean, messy, and petty. It’s “office politics” writ large. We saw that we’ve completely bought into it. When someone makes a comment about it being like that, we nod. We know! But is it really true?

It’s not true. It’s a human concept, along with our myriad thoughts about it. And feelings. And memories. And memories of thoughts and feelings. It all lives in our ideas. We see what people do and say and we invent a generalized truth about it. And that generalized truth justifies us putting up with it, even with us acting consistent with it. In politics, it’s okay to want to win, dominate, “fight the good fight”, and hope for the best. Even “take no prisoners!”

How’s that working out for us? Not so well.

Luckily, it’s not true.

We forget: To err is human. Mostly we think that means we sometimes make errors. Another meaning is that to be correct, to have our thoughts be accurate one must distill real life into concepts. But real life can’t be distilled into concepts- not really. It’s not just a simplification, it’s an over-simplification.

We map reality onto concepts, or we represent reality with concepts. This is by definition an approximate endeavor. It’s rough. It’s error prone. It’s not only not exact, it’s not accurate, except in a view. When you limit what you see to this way of seeing it, only then it looks true.

If you believe in God, consider this. God created reality. Humans interpret it and represent it with concepts. Reality works. Our thoughts about it don’t work so well. We’re not God. To be human is to fundamentally live in a world of presumptuously thinking we know the truth, continuously being in error.

Anything we know, we see through a view. When we look at politics lots of different ways and see the same thing- that’s when we know our thinking is “inside the box”, inside a context. We all share this context- our political context is a cultural context.

But it’s just a context. We have a choice about what context we use, if we can be so conscious as to realize it’s a choice, and choose.

How about we make a different choice?

I’ll wrap this up in the next post.